Flight of the Gallus gallus domesticus
by Taliya
Summary: In which Koizumi Akako turns out to be a very strange vegan, and Hakuba Saguru's dinner literally ran away. Written for Poirot Café's Prompt Exchange #6.


Detective Conan and Magic Kaito characters, settings, and ideas do not belong to me but to Aoyama Gōshō.

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Warnings: Crack-ish-ness?

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Flight of the _Gallus gallus domesticus_

By Taliya

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Prompt: Akako, Hakuba, and zombie chickens

Word Count: 1711

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"Bocchama?" the Hakuba housekeeper asked with a knock on his door, "It's dinner time!"

Hakuba Saguru sighed as he finished up the last of his calculus homework. _And done! Right on time,_ he thought satisfactorily as he replied, "I'll be downstairs in a moment, Baaya." He clipped the loose-leaf sheets of paper into his mathematics binder and stowed it in his book bag. Stretching, he groaned in satisfaction as several of the joints in his back popped, releasing the tension that several hours' worth of homework had generated.

With a spring in his step, he glided into the dining room, looking forward to a restful evening, as calculus had been the last of his weekend homework assignments. The elderly housekeeper set a whole roasted chicken down in the center of the table, the bird cooked to a beautiful golden brown. Around it was a wreath of artfully placed flowerets of steamed and seasoned broccoli, cauliflower, fingers of baby carrots, and fingerling potatoes. Saguru's stomach grumbled hungrily in anticipation. "That looks delicious, Baaya," he complimented.

She smiled and murmured, "Nothing but the best for Bocchama."

Saguru was just about to cut himself a quarter of the chicken when the doorbell rang. He rose, following the housekeeper to the door out of curiosity as he was not expecting anyone and his father generally came home quite late. He blinked upon finding none other than Koizumi Akako on his doorstep. "Koizumi-kun?"

"My apologies for interrupting so late," she began, "but I had a question about our English homework that was driving me up the wall."

"Not a problem," Saguru answered. "I haven't begun eating dinner yet, so perhaps you would like to join me for the meal before we commence?"

The young woman metaphorically backpedaled. "I couldn't possibly intrude," she said, flushing in embarrassment. "I _knew_ I picked a bad time to visit."

Saguru smiled at her flustered state, as Koizumi was rarely, if ever, ruffled. "Please. I would enjoy the company."

Koizumi shyly smiled and accepted with quiet grace. "Please pardon the intrusion," she murmured as she stepped into the house and stepped into the guest slippers Saguru provided.

"This way," he said, leading her to the dining room. The blond held out a chair for her to sit, only to belatedly realize that she had frozen at the door, a look of dumbstruck horror on her face. "Koizumi-kun…?" he asked hesitantly.

His classmate lifted a hand up to point at the table and pointed, her other hand clasped over her mouth. "Why is _that_ there?" she whispered, her visage paling.

Saguru glanced at the set table. Nothing out of the ordinary caught his attention. "… that…?" he asked quizzically.

"Poor bird," she breathed. "Why did you kill it?"

"Kill what?" The half-Briton blinked. "The… chicken…?" His brain was rapidly piecing together the fact that she was apparently a rather fervent vegan, by the looks of it. "Would you like me to take it back to the kitchen?" he asked so that it would be out of her immediate sight.

" _No!"_ She stumbled to the table and snatched the platter with the whole roasted bird on it. "It needs closure!" she stated as she marched back out, slipping into her shoes and leaving his house. Saguru followed, baffled at what she was planning to do with his main entrée.

His classmate muttered something under her breath, and a long oval tall enough for a person to step through appeared, the edges emitting an eerie crimson light. The center was occluded by red smoke curling upwards before a black background. What lay beyond the portal was unknown.

 _Magic?_ Saguru's mind supplied, and though he tried to find a logical explanation for the presence of a _portal to somewhere_ floating in the middle of the street, there was nothing _remotely_ logical about its existence.

 _End stop._

Koizumi stepped through and disappeared with no hesitance in her movements and Saguru, ever curious, hurried after her lest the portal disappear before he could follow. He stepped out into a cavernous, dimly lit living room. The décor was gothic in nature; the atmosphere, oppressive. Saguru glanced about curiously before catching sight of his classmate handing the bird over to a squat, hunchbacked manservant.

She herself walked off, her usual school outfit melting away into a long, hooded black robe in a way that defied explanation—even _with_ everything he had seen at Kaitou KID heists. She stalked down a staircase into the basement, the hunched manservant with the roasted chicken trailing behind and Saguru following further back with hesitant curiosity in his tread after he had mumbled, "Please pardon the intrusion."

His classmate stopped at the bottom, where a large cauldron sat within a circular room, its belly half full with a clear liquid that appeared to be water. "Prepare for the ritual," she brusquely instructed her manservant as she gathered various ingredients from the shelves that ringed the walls. Saguru remained on the foot of the stairs so he could ensure he was out of the way; his eyes watched as Koizumi—a witch? sorceress? magician?—collected various items: jars containing dried fern fronds, round eyeballs from some unfortunate mammal species, snail shells, fragments of several sorts of tree bark, white downy feathers, appendages that looked to be rodents' feet, several various types of what appeared to be pickled animal innards, and the skull of a raven.

 _What sort of vegan_ are _you to use preserved animal parts in a spell?!_ he wondered incredulously, and only when she snapped her gaze darkly at him did he realize that he had actually _spoken his thought out loud_. He barely managed to refrain from cringing and hiding behind the banister while praying, _Please don't turn me into some sort of creature!_

"I do not like the idea of killing other creatures for sustenance," she informed him loftily, "but they are, unfortunately, a requirement for spell work." Her gaze returned to the cauldron, which her manservant had lit a fire under and the contents had now come to a rolling boil. Koizumi proceeded to toss her ingredients in, murmuring and incantation quietly as she worked. Saguru flinched as four standing sconces along the perimeter of the room ignited with flames of deep violet. The liquid within the cauldron had begun to emit a similar color, and Saguru observed with quiet terror Koizumi's satisfied grin.

"The bird?" she queried, and the blond's dinner was offered. The witch plucked the chicken from the platter and slid it into the cauldron with a last, solemn intonation and stepped back to wait. The violet light of the fluid brightened to a deep red, and from the depths of the cauldron, something broke the liquid's surface with a sputtered squawk.

Saguru watched in growing horror as something fought its way to the edge of the cauldron, and his classmate flicked a hand in its direction to lift it out.

 _It's… it's bloody_ hideous _…_ he thought as he stared in alarmed disgust at his reanimated main course. The chicken was missing the vertebrae of its neck, and so the raven's head had melded flush with its torso, and it had the feet of what Saguru presumed to be a rat's. Koizumi set it down on the ground, and it flapped its wings, its patchy white body dripping with the liquid of the cauldron's contents as it screeched, its cry a hoarse cross between a chicken's cluck and a crow's caw. "What _is_ that…?" he breathed.

Koizumi shrugged. "A zombie chicken, I guess," she answered and watched with amusement as the undead creature hobbled and flapped its way towards Saguru. The blond recoiled as the zombie chicken began to climb the stairs. Its movements became more coordinated the longer it—lived?—and its feathers began to grow out. By the time Saguru had backpedaled to the ground floor, the undead bird was easily hopping the steps and practicing flapping its wings. Koizumi nonchalantly followed, watching with a fond gaze.

They made their way back to the living room, and Saguru barely restrained himself from kicking the undead animal when it approached him to peck at his cuffs. Only the thought of the sorceress doing something to him for injuring her latest "pet" stayed his foot. "Well," he remarked faintly after the creature had wandered off, "I suppose I should return home. Did you still require my help with your homework?" he asked, belatedly recalling the reason his classmate had arrived at his house in the first place.

She eyed him speculatively. "Not now, but maybe later I'll need help with… _chemistry_." The grin she sent him chilled him to the core, as he immediately understood "chemistry" was a euphemism for "whatever the heck had happened in the basement".

"R-Right," he stuttered, and wasted very little time retreating to the genkan to retrieve his shoes. He opened the door to let himself out when there was a squawk of undeniable glee—how Saguru knew _that_ was anyone's guess—and the zombie chicken shot past his feet, flapping its wings as it scuttled onto the walkway and disappeared into the forest that his classmate apparently kept on her property. Saguru blinked, dumbfounded, before his eyes returned to the witch. She simply grinned once more in return, and Saguru positively _fled_ as his nerves broke.

"Where are you going?" Koizumi's voice purred in his ear as he was bodily restrained by something incorporeal and invisible, and he fought his restrains, yelling and struggling—

—only to wake up with chest heaving and sweat rolling down his brow, utterly tangled in his bedding.

Saguru forcefully relaxed his body, gulping several deep breaths as he calmed himself down. "It was just a dream," he murmured repeatedly, "It was just a dream." He lay still for several minutes to calm his racing heart before he managed to untangle himself from his sheets. He padded to his bathroom to wash his face and wipe his neck before he returned to the bed. Settling himself in, he noted that his alarm clock read 3:25 and rolled over, sleep quickly reclaiming him.

Outside his window, unbeknownst to him, a deformed hybrid chicken-raven gazed at him before hopping off the sill and disappearing into the early morning darkness.

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Author's Note: I have absolutely nothing against vegans, but some of their idiosyncrasies were greatly exaggerated for the purposes of this story. And I turned the prompt from multiple chicken into chicken, singular. I think this has to be the most crack-y thing I've written to date, but there really wasn't much I could do that _wasn't_ crack with a prompt like this. At any rate… To whoever it was I wrote this for, I hope you enjoyed it.

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Completed: 21.09.2016


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